2006/9/17, Ellis Godard <egodard at csun.edu>:
> An empiricist ontology and scientific epistemology work both to
> bound belief with an openness to falsification (addressing Feyerabend's
> point)
Feyerabend observed that falsificationism fails to describe what
scientists actually do: new theories are often falsified as soon as
they are proposed, yet end up overcoming this obstacle and becoming
dominant anyway. In other words, sometimes belief is stronger than
empirical evidence, and this is a good thing, because otherwise we
wouldn't have the theories of Copernicus, Galileo or Einstein.
There's a summary of this argument here:
http://www.galilean-library.org/feyerabend.html
> P.S. I highly, and frequently, recommend reading Lakatos on methodological
> falsificationism, a near-perfect sliver of philosophical reasoning.
Feyerabend offered a straightforward refutation of Lakatos; it is
included in the article located at the above link.
John